German radio added drama this morning by reporting that some German dialects such as Kölsch, Bairisch (Bavarian), and Letzeburgisch are in danger of extinction - a bit of an exaggeration, as you can check out on the "UNESCO Interactive Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger" which lists eg Bavarian as merely "unsafe" (and let me tell you, if you don't know Bavarian, it is definitely unsafe to use it).

Anyway, our blog works quite well because we and you, dear readers and commenters, can communicate without major accidents in one common language, English (or so we hope). But this is not our native tongue, and maybe it isn't yours either.

Looking at the visitors statistics (see below) of Backreaction, it seems that more than 75% of all readers come from English-speaking countries - but this actually just reflects the "language settings" of the visiting web browsers. It doesn't say necessarily much about the mother language of the real people using these browsers (Bee eg has her settings on US-English).

So, to celebrate International Mother Language Day and to learn more about the background and diversity of our readers, we invite you to leave in the comments a few greetings in your actual mother tongue - and maybe you can add what language it actually is :-)

34 comments:

Low Math, Meekly Interacting
said...

I'm afraid I'm a rather boring native American English speaker. I grew up in Maine, however, which harbors a rather distinctive, some would say "quaint", dialect and non-rhotic accent, the so-called "Down East" variant of the New England accent. So, in the stereotypical manner of my "motherland", Hello out theyah all you folks from all ovah. It's wicked good to be heyah, and Oi want to thank Bee and Stefan foah bein' so smaht an' sharin' it with us.

English-speaking USian, although I'm also fairly fluent in Spanish. At our small school in Colorado, the most linguistically diverse students are the Cora Indians who speak three languages--Cora (a Uto-Aztecan language), Spanish, and English. The Utes were native Coloradoans; the Aztecs were native Mexicans. Therefore, I make sure these particular students know that they have two proud heritages (although linguistically separated by several thousand years).

Translation:Hello Bee and Stefan,I came across your blog while I was vacationing back in my homecountry, a small island in the Indian Ocean. I'm a Mauritian, and at the moment I'm a physics student at the University of Munich. I read you blog as often as I can, and you write great stuff.Keep it up!

FYI: My mother tongue is the Mauritian Creole, a language native to about 1.3 million people. The Mauritian Creole is a language that started as a language of communication between the African slaves brought to the island by the French, and the French colonials. It is thus only a spoken language (the words I have written are only phonetically creole and would normally be read as French, and could be written differently by other natives).

I just realized that simple statements (like the one above) are not at all easy to translate, their meanings are so entangled in cultures.

Anyways, the language is Bengali. In fact, the Mother Language day is a recognition of the Language Movement Day of Bangladesh. The history is briefly this : Pakistan was initially comprised of two geographically separated bits : East and West Pakistan. They shared the same religion (Islam) but spoke different languages (Urdu and Bengali). Then the govt decided that there must be one language in both countries: Urdu. So there was this movement in East Pakistan against it, and on one 21st February, a number protesting students were shot.

Although International Mother Language Day is now, you may be interested in the contribution, made by the World Esperanto Association, to UNESCO's campaign for the protection of endangered languages.

The following declaration was made in favour of Esperanto, by UNESCO at its Paris HQ in December 2008. http://portal.unesco.org/culture/en/ev.php-URL_ID=38420&URL_DO=DO_PRINTPAGE&URL_SECTION=201.html

The commitment to the campaign to save endangered languages was made, by the World Esperanto Association at the United Nations' Geneva HQ in September.http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=eR7vD9kChBA&feature=related or http://www.lernu.net

As you are probably aware my only spoken language is English, yet it doesn’t represent my lineage. My surname is one that originates from Alsace- Lorraine, where both French and German are spoken. My mother’s maiden name is German. One grandmother's maiden name is of a nature which assures that along with French there is also aboriginal North American in the mix. Also, from what I know about my family tree I can add Irish, Scottish, Scandinavian and English as well. So although my spoken language is limited, my gene pool is more of a global nature and as such would wish that along with the appreciation and importance of diversity, that in the end our commonalities be the most recognized as to be celebrated.

thanks for the update on the origin of the "Mother Language Day!" Forcing people to use a language never seems to be a clever idea - Phil's ancestors from Alsace-Lorraine probably could tell also stories about this...

My language is Kannada. It is the mother-tongue of one of the four states of Southern-India. Since the time when people from the Indus valley migrated along the coastlines to settle and establish a community in where is now the state of Karnataka, we've been speaking languages such as this one. Let the multitudes of people of the world grow along with the multitudes of the world's languages.

(Note that I didn't bother with the accents, since it'd be too much work with my keyboard!)

"Greetings and congrats on the blog! I read it often and I usually learn something new. My first language is Spanish, then I came to the US and learned English, and, like Aaron, also studied Russian. Ah, and the settings in my browser are in English."

Now I should translate it, right... well, well. First I may say that I am from Rio de Janeiro and we have a strong accent of Portuguese that is most perceptible in speech. I will do my best to try to say the same above as I would speak it: